Life in Culebrón

Cabeço towers above Pinoso. It's a salt dome. There are traces of human habitation there in pre-history and people still live on its slopes today. Plonked right on the top are a series of masts which people refer to as the repetidor, the repeater. It's a while since I've been up there but I think there is a mobile phone mast and I know that the local radio station uses one of the masts too. Apparently it's become a bit of a local tradition to take a night-time stroll up the 893 metre high hill on one of the days during a week dedicated to promoting sport and a healthy lifestyle in Pinoso. Personally it's the first time I'm ever heard of it so the promotion must be spot on but there you go. This year all the walkers were being asked to contribute a euro with the cash going towards research into rare diseases. I thought I'd go and see if there were any potential snaps. I had this idea of a really wide angle shot with someone looking suitably rugged putti...

On Friday afternoons, in Cartagena, Maggie and I used to go to a Spanish language group organised by one of the local language schools. We paid a couple of euros and the language centre sent a teacher or two to moderate the session. The group was made up of lots of us foreigners - principally Brits and Dutch but with the occasional Czech and Zimbabwean thrown in - and the idea was that we all spoke Spanish to each other. It was organised into largish discussion groups dependant on the number of attendees with some chosen topic of conversation. The numbers dwindled when the language school upped the price to five euros and, eventually, so few people attended that it was knocked on the head. Maggie wondered about doing something similar between Spaniards and English speakers in Pinoso but somebody else beat her to it. Every Wednesday one of the local bars, Cafe Coliseum, acts as the venue. The organiser is an efficient young woman, who I'm sure introduced herself to me but whose ...

My draft tax declaration became available online the other day. Because I was self employed for a while in the 2015 tax year I'm going to need an accountant to sort it out but I'm putting off ringing him till my UK tax documentation turns up. Curiosity got the better of me though and I thought I would have a look at the online version to see what the tax office's initial assessment was. Rebate or more to pay? On the first page, more or less in the first line, I noticed that my name was wrong. Although the effect on the printed form looks fine, which is presumably why I've missed it for the past ten years as have various tax offices and accountants, in fact the surnames and first names are mixed up. So they have my name as Jo and my surname as Christopher Thompson. The Jo is because, when I first registered at the Social Security, their database only had room for a forename fourteen characters long so the Christopher John had to be pruned. Heaven knows what Pablo Die...

I seem to have lost the Pinoso weather station and, like my mini loud speaker, I can't find it. The state weather service here is called AEMET, La Agencia Estatal de Meteorología. The service uses all sorts of mechanisms, including data collected from a series of traditional weather stations dotted around Spain, to build up its records and to make weather predictions. One of the weather stations is, or at least was, in Pinoso. From what I can make out this is because a local teacher, whose nickname is Capito, started to collect basic weather information as a classroom project. With time the project, and the equipment, developed to the point when his data formed a part of the AEMET network. There was an event in February 2015 to celebrate 25 years of Capito's weather recording in Pinoso. I check the website on an almost daily basis but, for the past few weeks, the Pinoso data has been missing. I presumed it was a technical problem. Then, a couple of days ago the Pinoso n...

Sunday and nothing much to do so we went for a bit of a drive around. We went over Zarza way and into the Sierra de la Pila. Maggie suggested a tapas place in Algorrobo for lunch but as we were on single track mountain roads we could either go back via Zarza or round via Fortuna. It was about quarter past three as we rolled into Fortuna so I suggested eating there. Maggie wasn't keen. Fortuna is not her favourite place. A few minutes later we were out of the danger zone and into Baños. Maggie spotted a sign for La Fuente which is a camp site built around a thermal spring. Now when I think camp sites I think lugging water in big jerry cans, wellis, shower blocks with concrete floors and water that never boils as the flame under the pan dances in the stiff breeze at the door to your, ever so slightly, cramped tent. It's a long time since I've been camping. I presume the experience is very different nowadays but perception and reality are very separate things. When I wor...